Getting to the right price: A bold initiative

Pricing is always a difficult issue in the channel. No one is ever satisfied: OEMs believe they deserve the lion's portion of the profit, customers always think the price should be lower, and solution providers, of course, are caught in the middle.

The terms "enterprise-class," "fault-tolerant," and "realtime messaging" aren't usually strung together for the midsize-business market. Sonic Software hopes to change that with its release Monday of SonicMQ 6.0, high-volume, fault-tolerant middleware that can be installed on off-the-shelf hardware. Suitable for mission-critical applications, the software costs $15,000 per CPU pair.

Verizon bids $5B to block Nextel

The wireless spectrum war is intensifying. Nextel Communications and Verizon Wireless are battling over the 1.9-GHz band, while many public-safety organizations continue to back a proposal that would reshuffle most of Nextel's traffic into the upper end of the 800-MHz spectrum.

Motherboards based on Advanced Micro Devices' 64-bit Opteron processor are gradually starting to find their way into white-box servers built by solution providers, especially in high-end workstations and server applications.

Scene last week at an East Coast Gateway Country Store: six employees huddled in a corner, joking and ignoring three or four customers evaluating products ranging from plasma TVs to camcorders. Equipment dangles off shelves, looking broken and very, very sad.

A bumpier-than-expected transition from DDR1 to DDR2 memory technology could create additional opportunities for chip maker Rambus, an executive said last week, as system builders weigh pricing and compatibility issues with DDR2.

THREE PLEAD GUILTY IN ONGOING CA FRAUD INVESTIGATIONThree former Computer Associates International executives last week entered guilty pleas as part of cooperative agreements with federal prosecutors in an ongoing securities fraud investigation.

Doron Kempel says selling hyper-convergence can be challenging for solution providers, but success will come from taking business from competitors that are unprepared or hesitant to embrace the technology.